A wonderful project needs contribution, coders/maintainers - Autokey

Hi Friends,

Autokey is a wonderful and easy automation tool and probably the ONLY one we have on Linux of this category. It is equivalent of Phrase Express, Shorthand, etc., on Windows. That was the sunny side of the story.

The sad part is that the author of the project, cdekter, had to stop devoting more time on it due to his personal constraints. Hence, there is no further development going on. I am a noob and hence isn't of much help. I thought at least I can try to garner help for the project and spread the word.

AutoKey is a desktop automation utility for Linux and X11. It allows you to manage collection of scripts and phrases, and assign abbreviations and hotkeys to these. This allows you to execute a script or insert text on demand in whatever program you are using.
AutoKey features a subset of the capabilities of the popular Windows-based AutoHotkey, but is not intended as a full replacement. For a Linux-based implementation of AutoHotkey, see IronAHK. AutoKey's GUI features a number of concepts and features inspired by the Windows program PhraseExpress.

Basically, it allows you to create a quick script on the fly and it would do multiple things including:a. expand text - type "al" and it would expand it to "Arch Linux" and so on. You can add phrases.b. you can add keystrokes in series to do certain laborious tasks (though right now, adding series of keystrokes is a laborious tasks itself as you would need to type code for each keystroke)

I have not used xdotool, but by reading about it, it seems like you would need to create a lot of scripts to do anything. In Autokey, all the scripts are managed from it's interface/gui making it easy manage and look for the scripts. Moreover, creation of script itself (at least for text expansion) is easy by means of a preinstalled script).

I know nothing about this project. But what about IronAHK that is mentioned right on the google code page?

IronAHK is a full fledged scripting tool. Autokey is something more close to a text expander which allows you to quickly add abbreviations and their expanded forms. In addition to that it would allow you to quickly create small scripts to automate key presses.

I am not very sure how they would differenciate exactly, but i think the emphasis here is on the ease of creating and managing scripts/expansions.

I use Autokey every day. It's awesome. The ability to write scripts for it in Python makes it very powerful. However, I don't see anything that really needs fixing (besides a minor bug that I fixed locally), so at least it will continue to run great even though it isn't maintained. It already has GTK3 and Qt (w/ KDE libs eww) interfaces which is nice.

I know nothing about this project. But what about IronAHK that is mentioned right on the google code page?

IronAHK is dead in the water - it was meant to be a linux version of the great windows program. If you can get it to work at all you are lucky and most of the features of the original prog never got done.